Posts by Martin Chandler

Should've gone to Specsavers!

This is a very short-sighted move by the Met, no doubt fuelled by someone's bonus target. Firstly, predicted savings are always guesstimates at best, and even then, they always specify the best case scenario so dont expect anywhere near this amount of savings.

Secondly, contracting to anything IT related for more than 3 years is massively risky given the rate of change in IT let alone any business change. The Met (and its IT needs) will be a very different place in 10 years, just like its very different now to how it was 10 years ago. However, expect any desire to keep pace with that change to be met with a change to the contract. Kerching! Those savings dont look so rosy anymore.

Finally, even if the outsourcer accepted changes, it will never deliver at the same pace as would happen with an internal team. There are so many more hurdles to jump through and red tape to cut when trying to effect change via an outsourcer than an in-house resource.

Still, at least the director responsible for pushing this through will still get his bonus and move onto a new juicy position well before this dodgy contract falls to pieces.

SDN has NOT reached maturity

This article starts out plain wrong and just gets worse. Just look at the mess that is OpenStack networking:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/13/openstack_neutron_explainer/

Furthermore, just because a bunch of big names are involved in something, didn't mean it's currently a good idea. The market place is changing in this industry and no one wants to be left behind. So you find big names sticking their fingers in almost every 'open' pie for two reasons 1) to make themselves look like a collaborator so as not to scare off any potential customers and 2) to try and influence the technology to more closely align with their own strategies. You just have to look at Cisco's efforts to get OpFlex adopted by OpenDaylight project as an example of this. It's also worth noting that most vendors are also developing at least partially proprietary SDN solutions alongside their work in these 'open' projects. Does SDN really look mature when you see the industry hedging its bets on multiple strategies?

What about DevOps?

It seems a lot of your frustration has come not just from moving out of tech and into management but actually from working within very restrictive IT environments. Naturally, the governance processes adopted within larger organisations are going to be more onerous than in a small start up, but that is necessary, to a degree.

You talk about how exciting and refreshing it is to do development on your laptop, using your own tools and being able to get what you want when you want. But in a larger organisation that needs to scale, a certain amount of standardisation is necessary to avoid other issues further down the road.

I have seen a relatively high profile project developed on someone's laptop/mac go live in a production data centre to almost disastrous results as the development did not take into account the deployment environment soon enough.

At our workplace, we are working very hard to implements a DevOps culture where infrastructure personnel are embedded in agile development teams so the Devs can get rapidly deployed dev environments including sandbox virtualised dev environments on their laptops, and the infrastructure teams get the automation, scalability and supportability that they need. This is still likely to be a little slower than leaving the devs to their own devices, but ultimately the organisation as a whole should benefit.

I can't believe...

you kowtowed to this poor excuse for a Service Provider!!

"During my discussions with BT, I agreed not to publish any of the specific responses that were provided to me"

Perhaps you thought you were doing a broader service to the public by working with these people to address these issues and thought sacrificing your journalistic freedom was a worthy price to pay ...But it is this journalistic freedom that (usually) works best at holding companies like these to account. If BT had any common decency, they would correct these issues regardless of what you do or do not print, therefore you should have honoured your 'customers', the reading public and published what is clearly in their interest.

This isn't a virus, it's a feature!

1 Jobsonians 10:13 Fear not for he shall not test you more than ye can bare!

This was on the BBC... yesterday

Also, on the Newsnight programme was BBC Science reporter, Susan Watt's debit card details including sort code and account number!

AllofMP3.com Workaround

I use Demon broadband (Thus plc) and have the same problem. Are there any other non-Virgin Media users which have the same problem?

Anyway, I think I have found a workaround. I have installed Google Web Accelerator and this seems to have fixed it for me.

Hope this helps.